The Wells Fargo wagon was a’comin’

Friday

Nov 11, 2011 at 2:00 AM

A stagecoach arrived at the newly relocated Wells Fargo office on Route 132 in Hyannis on Saturday afternoon.

Ellen Chahey

ELLEN C. CHAHEY PHOTOS

ALL’S WELLS – Randall Schievella, Hyannis branch manager for Wells Fargo Advisors, looks authentic in his Western garb as he poses by the stagecoach that arrived for the grand opening of his new office on Route 132 in Hyannis Nov. 5.

Financial advisers’ move marked by visit of company stagecoach

A stagecoach arrived at the newly relocated Wells Fargo office on Route 132 in Hyannis on Saturday afternoon. It came to celebrate the new home of an established local branch of a national business, but its cargo also included a generous lesson in American history.

Getting oysters to Buffalo, NY, and mail to California during the 1850s, ‘60s and ‘70s, years that involved strife of all kinds across the North American continent – religious, ethnic, social, political, and regional – would have been enough of a challenge with the best of roads or the fastest of trains.

But, said stagecoach driver Tyke Frost of Deerfield, NH, whose rig and horses are housed there and who rode here in a monster Peterbilt, “America wasn’t conquered by the Romans, so we had no roads.” Railroads were making progress, but were not connected coast-to-coast for much of the period.

The answer at the time was the stagecoach.

Built in Concord, NH by the Abbott and Downing Company, the coaches were suspended above their wheels on sturdy leather “thoroughbraces” that cushioned their passengers from at least some of the bone-rattling overland travel. Inside the vehicle, well-padded leather seats offer even more comfort. Frost said that Mark Twain called an Abbott and Downing coach “a cradle on wheels.”

The wagon that visited Hyannis Nov. 5 was a replica, Frost explained. He said that Abbott and Downing numbered their coaches, and that this one copies number 599, a nine-passenger “mail stage” with room on the roof for baggage and payload. The original is now the centerpiece of a museum in Los Angeles, Frost said.

He drives the replica, one of several that travel around the country to publicize Wells Fargo, with a team of four horses that he said are “half Belgian, half quarter horse.” Tended by Frost’s wife Sue, the equines are named Magic, Bandit, Smoke, and Fire.

The Hyannis branch manager of Wells Fargo Advisors, a financial management service, is Randall Schievella of Marstons Mills. Like Frost, he wore a Western costume complete with a sheriff’s badge. “This is the grand opening,” he said of the office that is newly relocated from 30 years at other Hyannis sites. “So,” he explained, “because the wagon and horses represent the brand of our company, it seemed only natural” to have them at the event.

The wagon stayed off busy Route 132. Instead, it took a scenic route behind the office building, with pretty pond views filtered by trees beginning to show their autumn colors.

Although the name Wells Fargo seems synonymous with the American West, it actually bears the last names of a man from Vermont who wanted to ship oysters from New England to Buffalo, NY, and the mayor of Buffalo who wanted to receive them. Both men were directors of American Express, according to Frost.

When Wells and Fargo got the idea of capitalizing on the migration to California by shipping mail and merchandise, and offering financial services, American Express opposed them, and the men struck out on their own, said Frost. From California, they first started a route to Salt Lake City, and then bought the Great Overland route, which connected their service back to the East.

On Saturday afternoon, under blue skies and puffy white clouds, numbers of families with young children gathered soon after the opening time of 1 p.m. to wait their turn for a ride on the wagon. So did a bystander who wanted to know if there was a charge to get on.

When another passenger told him the amusement wouldn’t cost him, he quipped, “Well, I have my accounts with them, so I guess I’m entitled to a free ride.”